Stefano Soatto stands as a distinguished leader in computer vision and artificial intelligence research with significant contributions spanning academia and industry. He currently serves as Vice President of Applied Science for Amazon Web Services' AI division while maintaining his position as Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UCLA, where he is on leave. Soatto earned his D.Eng. in Electrical Engineering with highest honors from the University of Padua in 1992 and completed his PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1996 under the guidance of Professor Pietro Perona. His academic journey included a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University followed by faculty positions at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Udine in Italy before joining UCLA in 2000 where he founded and directed the UCLA Vision Laboratory.
Soatto's groundbreaking contributions to dynamic visual processes revolutionized the field of computer vision earning him the prestigious David Marr Prize in 1999 the highest honor in computer vision research. His seminal work on Structure from Motion established fundamental algorithms that characterized ambiguities and provided optimal solutions for 3D reconstruction from 2D images with his lab demonstrating the first real-time implementations at CVPR 2000 ICCV 2001 and ECCV 2002. His research on visual-inertial fusion identity and observability laid the theoretical foundations for modern augmented reality systems and autonomous navigation technologies. For his exceptional contributions to dynamic visual processes he was honored as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 cementing his status as a preeminent researcher in the field.
As the founding director of the UCLA Vision Lab Soatto has cultivated a legacy of innovation that bridges theoretical computer vision with practical applications across multiple domains. His leadership extends to Amazon Web Services where he directs the development of transformative AI services including computer vision natural language processing forecasting and foundational large language models through Amazon Bedrock and Titan. Recognized with the Siemens Prize with the Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE Computer Society for his work on optimal structure from motion, jointly with Roger Brockett Soatto continues to shape the trajectory of artificial intelligence through his service as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence from 2003 to 2008 and as a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer Vision. Currently his research focuses on understanding the risks and opportunities presented by large-scale generative models while maintaining his commitment to mentoring the next generation of computer vision researchers through his ongoing academic affiliation with UCLA.
